{"id":5808,"date":"2024-04-16T21:31:12","date_gmt":"2024-04-17T02:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/press\/?p=5808"},"modified":"2026-02-08T15:09:27","modified_gmt":"2026-02-08T20:09:27","slug":"where-i-stand-in-angel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/books\/where-i-stand-in-angel\/","title":{"rendered":"WHERE I STAND IN ANGEL"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Louise Landes Levi<\/strong> \u2022 <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
PD: SUMMER 2024 \u2022 ISBN: 978-1-887276-43-6<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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ORDER THIS BOOK<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In WHERE I STAND IN ANGEL the subject is appropriation. Levi borrows from Ginsberg (the title is from Kaddish, Part V<\/em>), Gysin & Burroughs have borrowed from Ma Chig, for the initiates Ma Chig Labdron, founder  of Chod – to CUT, a female lineage transformed at the Beat Hotel, Paris, the 1950s, into \u2018a male cult\u2019, writes Terry Wilson, Gysin\u2019s biographer.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is rare poetry because it is a poetry intensely of the senses, and yet at the same time deeply spiritual in a kind of secret, Kabbalisitic way, so that at times it seems one must be initiated into the poetry as if one were learning a new or hidden religion.<\/span><\/strong> — Gerald Nicosia<\/strong><\/span>, from his introduction to Where I Stand in Angel.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What people are saying about Where I Stand in Angel<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vision and Duende in LLL\u2019s Angel<\/em><\/strong>
Antonio J. Bonome, PhD<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title Where I Stand in Angel<\/em> is itself a declaration. The book belongs to the same lineage as Allen Ginsberg\u2019s \u201cKaddish,\u201d where the poet stands at the grave, eye buried, voice calling into Sheol. Like Ginsberg\u2019s cawing cries and black-clouded Eye, Levi\u2019s visions do not console so much as demand presence. The Underworld\u2014announced on the back cover by Yokoo\u2019s collage title, \u201cYou Will Definitely Go to Hell\u201d (\u541b\u3082\u5fc5\u305a\u5730\u7344\u306b\u884c\u304f)\u2014appears here less as threat than as passage: a descent that renders knowledge concrete rather than abstract. This is where the concept of \u201cduende\u201d becomes difficult to avoid. Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca explained that duende does not descend from above like an angel; it rises from the ground permeating your being \u201cthrough the soles of your feet.\u201d Levi\u2019s poems are saturated with that energy. Her voice refuses safe distance, remaining in a zone where song entails struggle and vision is inseparable from wound. It is worth clarifying here that documenting injury and romanticizing pain are not one and the same thing. Duende, in this context, names neither aesthetic intensity nor inspiration, but the refusal to exit that condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Levi\u2019s poems insist on juxtaposition as method and exposure as insight. They also invite speculative reversals\u2014what if the collagist were not \u0160tyrsk\u00fd but Emilie herself; what if Kaddish were written from Naomi\u2019s position rather than Allen\u2019s; what if the Scarlet Woman, rather than Crowley, founded the Argenteum Astrum. Such gestures are not merely provocative but structural, re-centering vision within embodied, often feminized positions historically marginalized within avant-garde and esoteric traditions. Levi\u2019s stance aligns less with Surrealist urge than with ritual endurance. Where \u0160tyrsk\u00fd\u2019s dream erotics emphasize compulsive return, Levi\u2019s dreamwork\u2014inflected by Ch\u00f6d practice and tantric models of descent\u2014functions as offering. Experiences of loss, humiliation, desire, and grief are neither psychologized nor transcended; they are placed into the poem as material to be confronted and symbolically consumed. The self is not purified but dismantled or at least rendered unstable as a site of authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is perhaps telling that Louise Landes Levi does not appear prominently in many collections of \u201cwomen Beat writers.\u201d Whether this absence reflects critical oversight or deliberate positioning is difficult to determine. What can be stated with confidence is that Levi\u2019s work operates in direct continuity with Beat commitments to vision, sound and lived practice. Her relative invisibility may be less a failure of recognition than a chosen condition. There is something persuasive in the suspicion that Levi occupies the role of a hidden master, a task that seems to suit both her work and its uncompromising demands. Standing \u201cin Angel\u201d is not elevation but a maintained position at the crossing of worlds, where insight must be earned through endurance and exposure. Few contemporary poetry books are willing to occupy this space. Fewer still can sustain it without spectacle. Where I Stand in Angel is not, finally, a book to be decoded. It is a rigorous poetic diary\u2014ecstatic, uncompromising, and written with duende.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Antonio J. Bonome, PhD. Lecturer at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Beat Generation scholar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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ON FACEBOOK:
“Where I Stand In Angel ~ by Louise Landes Levi is a terrific, lyrical and fierce dispatch from the far margins of society, at turns deeply
romantic and compassionate, especially in the face of brutalities, clear-eyed of the often sanctimonious spiritual while never ever abandoning
the star she navigates her course by. She is the real deal, not often will you encounter such a person so generous in appraisal of this existence.
A true poet of the bardo.”
\u2014Aaron Sinift<\/strong> (editor\/founder, Five Year Plan https:\/\/www.5yearplan.org<\/a>\/).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I can only offer my ‘experience’, & that, not very gracefully. NAMKHAI NORBU taught ‘Experience is an ornament of the state’.
This book is my ornament.”\u2014LLL<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI love this book\u201d   \u2013 Jeffery Beam (Spectral Pegasus, The Fountain)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Reading Where I Stand In Angel <\/em>is an experiential journey, open to those who seek at the peripheries of trance. Each poem is part of a hidden tapestry, where self-reflection is amplified & redirected to the heart of human compassion, and where humor, transparency, political awareness, and the absurdity of today’s epistemic existence cuts through illusion to recuperate the feminine power that was never lost. Angel<\/em> evokes the funky yet graceful power of the femme-poet who wonders, where language (cut-up, reconfigured, charged) becomes life itself.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luc\u00eda Hinojosa Gaxiola, <\/strong>author of The Telara\u00f1a Circuit <\/strong><\/em> (Tender Buttons, 2023) & editor Di SONARE. www.diSONARE.com<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Louise Landes Levi\u2019s Where I Stand in Angel<\/em> (Coolgrove, 2024) announces itself, from its materiality, as a book of risk, vision, and color. Tadanori Yokoo\u2019s front-cover collage triangulates Jind\u0159ich \u0160tyrsk\u00fd\u2019s dark eroticism in Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream<\/em> with Hindu iconography and Aleister Crowley\u2019s Seal of Babalon. I read Yokoo\u2019s image as doing less to illustrate Louise\u2019s poems than to map a charged field in which method, eros, and danger converge. Once positioned thanks to that map, reading comes not as interpretive but participatory: language is offered, exposed, hazarded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Levi travels the road of the solitary, she graphically outlines uninvited sexual encounter (see Chicago Review, online, ME TOO), setting her experience of the nomadic, the exiled & the initiated \u2013 in the context of both the Western Buddhist community, as she experiences it – a remarkable departure from her previous work-also with Cool Grove, GURU PUNK &  her own personal extreme. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are now in the new millennium, Louise Landes Levi narrates her dissociation, but also her practice<\/span> in these poems, mostly untitled, from journals & from formal application of what for her, she hopes, is purification through poetic expression & encounter- an emptying of mind through the perimeters of exposure.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her pilgrimage covers  the cities of Europe, for her in decline, her birth place New York City & the small towns of Tuscana, site of rebirth & in this work, re-examination.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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….in the ‘vanished’<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

city<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

         of<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Libert\u00e9, \u00e9galit\u00e9, fraternit\u00e9<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 (dream yoga) igniting<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

      my \/  A A A<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CUT Up is the method \u2013 behind the cut up, the flow of raw sensibility & musical aspiration which in the decade which follow, actually manifest in a series of highly regarded recorded materials.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Front & rear cover by Tadanori Yakoo, whose brilliant collage work in the 1960\u2019s defined the sensibility of the era, for both East & West.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Louise Landes Levi \u2022 PD: SUMMER 2024 \u2022 ISBN: 978-1-887276-43-6 In WHERE I STAND IN ANGEL the subject is appropriation. Levi borrows from Ginsberg (the title is from Kaddish, Part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9422,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[218,101,109,90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coolgrove-press-imprint","category-louise-landes-levi","category-paperback","category-poetry","post-design-default"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/coolgrove.com\/books\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/ANGEL-PRODUCT-SHOT-REPLACE.jpg?fit=1025%2C1025&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wWvk-1vG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5808"}],"version-history":[{"count":36,"href":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9539,"href":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5808\/revisions\/9539"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolgrove.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}